Olga Grushin - Forty Rooms

“But you don’t ever cook at home,” she said. “Not like you used to.”

He shrugged. “You seem to manage so well by yourself… So what about you?”

“What about me?” she asked, though her heart was already skipping.

“What did you dream of being?”

She had not said certain things—not even to herself—in years, many years. She finished her drink before speaking. He waited patiently.

“Do you know, my mother once told me that women in my family liked to keep secrets. I guess that’s true. My mother had her share of secrets—I remember odd little things from when I was very small. There was, I think, another man. Maybe. Maybe not. I asked her once, after my father died, but she pretended not to hear. My grandmother had secrets too, as did my great-grandmother before her—there was something about a Grand Duke, or maybe a gypsy, I forget now… Anyway. I wanted a secret of my own. I wanted to have something deep and unreachable by anyone else, all to myself—a kernel of light or dark, I could never quite decide which, at the very heart of things. But I think maybe I chose the wrong thing to keep secret. It’s dangerous to make a secret not of something you do but of something you are , because if you go about wearing a mask for years and years, you may end up becoming what you were only pretending to be all that time—you may find that there is no face under the mask.” She knew she was tipsy now, but it felt marvelous to talk, and her words flowed with the easy eloquence of an oft-imagined speech. “And as time passes, you forget you ever even had a secret. You know, like when you hide something in case there is a break-in or to keep it safe from your maid—say, you put your diamond necklace in some pocket of an old coat or some shoe you never wear—and then you completely forget where you put it, and you look for a while, but then you think, well, anyway, it’s in the house somewhere, I’ll find it some other time, except you keep putting off the search until you forget that you ever had it, because honestly, how often do you have an occasion to wear a diamond necklace? So for months you go about without remembering it even once, until a year or two later, out of the blue, in the middle of the night, you wake up from this nightmare you keep having, this dream in which your house slowly eats you, and you sit bolt upright in bed and break into a sweat and scream: Oh God, where the fuck did it go?”

“I’m not sure I follow,” he said. “Are you telling me you lost the necklace I gave you on our twentieth anniversary?”

“Oh,” she said. “Oh, that. No, no, I’m sure it will turn up someday. Someday soon. I’m sorry, I think I’m a little drunk now. Anyway.” She upended the empty glass into her mouth, licked her lips. “I wanted to be a poet.”

And then she sat still for several thrilled, inebriated, frightened heartbeats, waiting, waiting for something—but the lightning bolt did not strike, and he did not tumble off the barstool, or mock her for her failure, and the ceiling did not split open to spill out torrents of heavenly light with Apollo riding a white steed and strumming a lyre as he smote her for having squandered her gift.

“Did you?” asked the young, friendly, curious boy from the library whose smile was so kind and who was so eager to talk to her. “Did you really? How come you never told me? You actually wrote poems?”

She wanted to laugh and laugh, astonished at how simple it had been, how simple it was. “Yes!” she exclaimed, then sobered up enough to add: “A long time ago.”

He swung the barstool around to face her. Their knees jammed together.

“Read some to me.”

“I can’t,” she protested, giggling. “I don’t remember any, it was decades ago… But wait, I remember this—” She looked away, recited all in a rush:

She stopped. He waited, smiling.

When she did not speak again, he prodded her lightly. “Well, go on.”

“That’s all.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s all. It was supposed to be a haiku, you see. It was the first poem I ever wrote in English. Well, maybe not the first one ever, just… one of the first ones.” She wondered if she was blushing. “I was nineteen. And the funny thing is, I had no idea what a haiku really was, so of course the syllables turned out all wrong, and when Apollo read it, he was quite amused—”

“Who?”

“Who what?”

“You said when Apollo read it—”

“Did I? God, I’m not used to drinking this much, it’s hard to keep up with you… I meant to say Hamlet. You remember. John. The guy who—”

“Yes,” he said. “I remember.” But his face had darkened, and he appeared every bit his age again—a man of fifty with eyes grown opaque and a voice hardened by decades of success and pressure. He pushed his unfinished drink aside. “I’m sorry. Sorry things have turned out this way. But God knows, I loved you.” He was silent for a moment, looking at her. “Did you ever love me?”

And all at once her thoughts were a disturbed nest of wasps, darting around with swift menace, all dangerously capable of stinging. She thought of confessing to the shattering loss of her youthful love, and her conviction, born in the solitary darkness of the following months, that she could never again give herself fully if she wished to remain faithful to her art. She thought of telling him of that time, shortly after his mother’s death, when she had seen herself in a new, stark, ugly light and been flooded with remorse, and blamed herself for everything that had gone wrong between them. She thought of asking him about the smell of perfume on his shirts. She thought of asking for another drink.

She became aware of the silence spreading wider and wider between them.

“Of course I did,” she said, speaking with something much like desperation—and, just like that, the wasps fell silent, and she knew it to be the absolute truth. “Of course I did. I still do. It’s almost as if—you know how you don’t choose your parents or your children? Well, after twenty-three years of marriage you don’t choose your spouse either.”

“Such passion,” he said, but he was smiling now, and as he put his hand over hers, she thought: And this too was easy, and it’s not too late, nothing is too late—and for another minute they sat, no longer drinking, in companionable silence, until she brushed his cheek, quickly, almost shyly, and said: “I’m going back upstairs. Join me soon, before I fall asleep.”

In the shadowy mirror above the bar, among the splintered reflections of tumblers and decanters, the dimly glimpsed middle-aged couple were having a conversation of their own. They talked about Rich’s difficult adolescence—they suspected him of dabbling in drugs, there was trouble at school. He was in favor of harsh disciplinary measures, but she wondered whether they shouldn’t take a family trip instead. They had never done it; of course, for years money had been tight, the house had sucked away everything, but they could try to do it now, could they not? Granted, his inheritance was not quite what he had expected, but wouldn’t it be worth a one-time splurge, it might bring them all closer together. He did not think much of the idea; how quick she was to spend his parents’ money, he said, what little there was of it. Hurriedly, before things veered off in an unpleasant direction, she mentioned Emma’s being less communicative of late, not returning her phone calls with the usual promptness, which she found a bit worrisome. Must she always be so oppressive, he said—the girl was entitled to cut loose in her college years. So they moved on to Eugene’s girlfriend; things were clearly serious between the two. She thought Adriana lovely, but he said that he doubted she’d make their son happy; she might be nothing but an Eastern European gold digger, he said. Conversation lapsed briefly after that, until she thought to mention her mother’s fragile health. She was hoping, she said, that they could persuade her to leave Russia and move in with them at last. He did not reply. She nursed her one drink. He was drinking steadily. His eyes were becoming bloodshot. After a while, he started to talk, staring directly ahead, past the bar, past the bottles, at whatever he saw in the mirror, beyond the mirror. Much of what he said made little sense to her, but he seemed to imply that her life had been easy, that he wished he too could stay home all day long drifting from room to room, playing peekaboo with babies, overseeing the domestics. She could not begin to imagine the stress of providing for a wife and six children, he said, she took things for granted, she took him for granted, she never asked about his work, did she even know what he did, she found him boring, he supposed—but she should take a long, hard look at herself instead. She held on to her silence with the tenacity of a drowning woman clinging to a log, until she could stand it no longer, until she found herself crying out that he—that he should drink less.